Saturday, February 6, 2016

Some Shards Actual Play

I actually got to play this afternoon with my friend and his son, and we made a few discoveries...My friend played a synthoid. Their omni-knowledge is AWESOME if played well. He had INT 14 (we started at level 3) and was able to interface with the computer aboard the orak gunship from the core rules. In a few seconds, he had completely overridden their controls, and had gathered all of the information from the ship's database. He was able to remotely trigger a self-destruct mechanism as they were leaving aboard an orak interceptor. Seriously cool stuff, and easily supported by the rules (it was both challenging and awesome, requiring a roll of 30. He rolled 17 on the die with his INT 14, so he snuck it through the uprights).His son played a terran templar, and the stunts balance very well. He tried to use a suggestion on one of the guards but failed, and then had to wait until next turn to call his sun blade to his hand, and cut himself out of the chains, which worked.

We played with the rules for generating junkers, and we ended up with a junker that had a dependability of 2! It broke down twice during a short combat, and only escaped because he was able to get the jump drive back online and win initiative before three interceptors finished the ship off. It was down to 2 hp when it jumped.***I'm giving the rules for XP some serious thought. I wanted to honor the original XP system from Saga of the Splintered Realm, but a different XP system may be in order, closer to the one in Sentinels of Echo City. Right now, I can see that any Junker is going to require the credits to be coming in hand over fist just to keep it running, and the XP balance on that is going to be somewhat difficult. Plus, the game lends itself to making off with vehicles valued in the tens of thousands of credits, meaning that you'd be getting routine (and unbalancing) XP spikes. This will be addressed in the March 1 update.